Original thread from my old forums
Ok so two months ago during the September wku-Linux meeting (Sept 2) I sold gears to a guy. The original price that we decided upon was $300 for it. When he arrived he said that he only had $280, but that he could get me the rest the next day. Since he is the airborne express delivery man for Edmonson County, that seemed like a moderately decent thought so I said sure. (Actually I was pretty sure I would never see him again.) So I gave him gears and all the kit I had for it. 10/100 NIC, floppy drive, power supply, cdrom, modem, phone cord, network cable. I had gears in a laptop case that belonged to Edmonson county so I told him that I needed the case back. He ask if he could borrow it until the next day and then he would give it back to me when he gave me the $20 bucks. I silently said goodbye to the case in my head and told him sure that would be fine.
I booted gears up and showed him that it worked fine. I had just installed the severn beta on it (so that it would remove my files and everything) so it booted up to a clean desktop. I told him the root password and then stated that the only problem that the laptop has was that when you warm reboot it, it will stop at the bios with an error and not continue. If you shut the machine off and then power it back on it is fine and works great. I then demonstrated this by rebooting it. The error popped up and I turned the power off and back on to show him that it was fine. It booted up and he was satisfied. He gave me the $280 and promptly left. I haven't heard from him since, until today. Today I got a call from him to my voicemail stating that the laptop had never worked and that it had been at Apollo computers since I sold it to him and that they had decided that it would need a new motherboard. He also stated that he had left me messages and that I had not returned his phone call. He actually had left me one message last week, while I was on vacation, that I disregarded, since he had stiffed me for the case and money. I figured that it was just some question about how to install Windows on it or something.
Now he wants me to either give him the money back, pay to have it fixed, give him another computer or he will take me to court over it (he says.).
I called him and told him that I didn't think I needed to replace the laptop since not only did it work when he bought it (and he admitted that it booted when he got home at least once), but that he had stiffed me for the money and that I thought over a month and a half was too long to wait to tell me that it didn't work. He stated, in less than sanitary words, that he thought I was wrong. Amazing to me I kept my cool dispite his increasingly out of hand comments. I told him that I had no intention of replacing the laptop in anyway, but that I might be able to help him get it working. If that didn't work then he could take me to court if he wanted, because I don't think I am in the wrong.
So he plans to bring the laptop by the office on friday so I can see if it will work. I still don't have any plans to replace it for him if it doesn't. I am not scared to go to court over it since IMO the worst thing that could happen is that I have to pay him $280. I don't see how that could happen though, since I don't see why a judge would side with him, but it is possible that I am missing some point. That is why I am posting here. I want all of you to please post your thoughts on the matter. If there is any information that you need besides what I have here then let me know. I am serious though everyone please post what they think. No holds barred.